The first two properties held by Broccolini Self Storage Fund LP opened recently in Québec – a milestone for the fund, which looks to build institutional-quality assets.
The vehicle owns the facilities – in Kirkland and Pointe-Claire – and engages Pandora Self-Storage for development and management. Pandora, essentially the fund’s operating platform and brand, is a joint venture between Broccolini and Robert Vineberg, who serves as its president. He has headed up Juno Developments and previously was Broccolini’s director of real estate development.
Green Street News spoke with Vineberg and Jordan Dawson, investor relations director for Broccolini, about the fund, the brand and its vision for expansion.
What’s the thesis of the Broccolini Self Storage Fund LP? What’s unique about it?
Dawson: The fund strategy is a unique one compared to other self-storage investment vehicles in Canada in two main ways. We’re primarily developing new facilities; we’re not buying existing ones. So if we look at supply in Canada, and in Québec in particular, it’s an undersupplied market. A lot of it’s older supply – B-class and C-class. We don’t want to just build a storage portfolio. We want to build a portfolio of true class-A, new, state-of-the-art storage facilities – truly the best of the best that we can build.
The second thing that’s unique is a lot of the big storage platforms in Canada are not necessarily Québec-focused. Québec is a market that presents unique barriers to entry, and a lot of the American and other national large players are sometimes less inclined to enter Québec , or they enter Québec last.
That’s one of the reasons there’s an even bigger supply-constrained market here in Québec, in Montreal. And if you look at the supply in Montreal, even more of the existing supply in Montreal is C-class, B-class. There’s a real opportunity to create new facilities.
When it comes to value, why build new versus buying old?
Vineberg: We’re build-to-hold, not build-to-flip.
As this is an evergreen fund, our design considerations today are not short term, they’re long term – the life cycle of the asset and the sum of its parts.
We’re bringing in customers we want to have with us forever, and as we expand, we want to be the place where they go time and time again as their needs change.
In terms of value, the existing buildings that have been converted over the years, a very good percentage of them are not up to today’s standards, let alone building codes.
All our new projects are designed to meet zero-carbon standards, and by doing that we’re able to improve the operating efficiency of the building, while reducing our ecological footprint in the very neighborhoods that we serve.
We’re highly focussed on building performance such as heating, cooling and humidity control to ensure that when our customers return for their goods, they are in the same condition as when they left it in our care. There is a massive disconnect in the industry between operators saying they’re climate controlled and those that actually are.
What other design elements add value?
Vineberg: In terms of design, zero-carbon design and related programs are important to us for the green aspect and for operational efficiencies.
Our upcoming Brossard project is a full drive-through facility. You can drive in the front, drive out the back. You’ll have 9-foot garage doors throughout the interior of the ground level featuring indoor and exterior access, so you can back up your commercial vehicles and have access to those spaces.
The ground-floor units are going to have extended heights, so if you’re a contractor, a tradesperson or you have a small business, you can be hyper-efficient by having space that’s scalable. You’re not going to be stuck trying to deal with covenant leases, which is a problem for a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses.
In the Kirkland [facility], we built a business centre. We’re adding coworking, where they can either rent offices, a hot desk or even something as simple as a boardroom to host meetings. There’s a lack of coworking space in the area, where we have a lot of people working from home. We have seen strong demand because it’s bite-size, and at a human scale. Our core business remains storage, and coworking has been designed to fit within our core model.
We’ve chosen sites that are at the corner of Main and Main. All of our sites focus on high-traffic areas that are servicing residential communities. Not a lot of people want to go to an industrial park at 10 o’clock at night to get their goods. Our Kirkland facility is next to the largest Canadian Tire. The Pointe-Claire facility is on the main drag.
Everything is fully access controlled. You don’t get to a floor that you’re not a tenant on. We have 75 cameras minimum per building in our current projects.
All three of your seed projects are in Québec. Any plans to expand beyond?
Vineberg: Right now, Québec is the initial launch point, because our headquarters are based here, where Pandora’s run. We have the operational efficiencies. We’re opportunistic. The immediate focus is Québec. We’ll be in Ontario very shortly.
Dawson: That’s our business model in general. We focus very much on Québec and Ontario, because that’s where we have the most presence and that’s where we can source our deals the most effectively, control our development projects the most effectively, because we have so many boots on the ground here.
The Canadian economy is on shaky ground. How do these assets hold up during downturns?
Dawson: What we like about storage a lot is it’s got a very healthy yield-cap rate spread. Something else we like about storage is that it’s one of the better performing asset classes in times of recession. It performs well. Given the volatility and uncertainty, both from a macro perspective and with respect to the real estate industry, it’s something we care about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons we like this asset class so much.
Vineberg: When times are good, when times are bad, storage is in demand. You may see a change in who the user base is, but you still have those same demand drivers.
